Fossil Abstinence: Working Wood

Gathering and Putting Away Firewood

Early spring is the best time for working wood. Unless one has draft horses, whose work may be easier when sliding logs over snow, the perfect time to gather branches and logs is over frozen, snow free ground. I use a tractor and cart to gather the six or seven cords of wood we use for cooking and heating. Most of it comes from fence rows along hay fields and if you wait too long, traveling over emergent grasses damages them. Also, many areas become very wet as frost leaves the soil which severely limits how much weight a cart can carry without getting stuck and really hurting the grass.

I don’t have a cart, yet, for my electric tractor and still use a small diesel powered tractor that can pull its cart with at least half a ton of wood. The smaller electric tractor will have to make many more trips. There are four steps involved in working wood:

1. Preparing space in the wood crib for the new wood;
2. Gathering it: cutting dead trees, fallen limbs and hanging branches into manageable pieces that stack well and are easy to carry;
3. Making piles where they can be covered until it’s processed; and
4. Cutting and splitting it into firewood that fits the stove and throwing it behind neatly stacked firewood walls that will allow access to wood that has been drying the longest next heating season.

Our garage has a high bay that holds both the wood crib and has enough space to stage the logs and branches to make a cord of firewood at a time. The ideal for us is to process wood as quickly as possible so that there is always room to pile a new load indoors. Up to four loads can readily fit inside where it can be cut and split even when it’s raining or dark.

Only about half the wood I gather needs to be cut to length. This is very easy to do with an electric chop saw for branches up to six inches in diameter. It’s permanently mounted to a bench next to the opening of the wood crib so it’s easy to throw pieces after cutting them to length. Using split firewood, I build walls that provide access to well-dried wood and allow throwing most of the wood randomly, without stacking. The loose piles also allow air to flow through so it dries well.  The wood crib is ten feet tall and constructed out of 2” x 6” studs with 1” x 2” slats. The retaining walls of stacked split wood are constructed in stages topping off at about eight feet high so it’s easy to toss pieces over the top, without having to climb. The final process involves building a wall across the wood crib opening and filling the volume behind as it goes up. This last section is the first to get burned so it’s important to finish it by the end of April to give it time to properly dry.

All the small pieces of wood: short lengths, branches smaller than 1″ in diameter and bark I store in bags. We have been reusing bags that chicken feed comes in for years but they are now getting fragile and sticks poke holes that let sawdust leak out on the kitchen floor. We keep a bag next to the stove so that kindling is always available. I’m starting to replace these paper bags with heavy duty fabric bags that I make out of tarps. Cutting a 6′ by 8′ tarp into four pieces and sewing two edges makes four great three foot tall bags. Filled, they stack like firewood when laid on their side and minimize handling wood.

I still use a gas powered chain saw for cutting manageable pieces to fill the cart but use electric saws for making it into firewood. Next year I hope to add an inverter to the electric cart that allows me to use the electric chain saws in remote places. That way they can all use electricity from sunlight. And I won’t have to wear hearing protection anymore.